MIT Brilliantly Picks College Dropout Joi Ito To Head Its Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab, which does research and prototypes of tons of cool new technology, plenty of which gets turned into great startups, has chosen Joi Ito as its next director. The Times has the story.

It's a brilliant move, because Ito is not an academic: he attended two colleges but dropped out both times. Instead, he's an entrepreneur, angel investor (in companies like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter), open source software activist and generally highly regarded tech visionary.

This is obviously a great career move for Ito -- there are few more prestigious jobs in tech than the MIT Media Lab -- but it's also a brilliant move from MIT. It recognizes that you don't have to be an academic, or even a college graduate, to be a great innovator and leaders of other innovators.

The MIT Media Lab pioneered many technologies like a fore-runner to Street View, e-ink, the technology used by e-readers like Kindle, and did work on 3D Printing.